[Nelly Noury]

Dear members of Francophone literatures and cultures,

I recently joined this forum but I am under the impression that there is no activity.

My hope was to exchange ideas, perspectives and new researches on the Francophone world. I am particularly interested in the field of postcolonial women writers/artists from the Maghreb but I am always looking forward to building interdisciplinary bridges.

Merci!

Nelly Noury-Ossia, University of Houston

[Claire Oberon Garcia]

Dear Nelly~

This and all of the other forums I am involved in is/are very inactive, which is why I wrote to the MLA organizer thinking that I was having some technical difficulty.  I’m deeply disappointed that this forum in particular isn’t a space for lively conversation and sharing research among our 152 members. As far as I know, this forum has never been active.

Maybe we could start by introducing ourselves and our research interests and projects. I’m a professor in the English Department at Colorado College and director of our Ethnic Studies program (soon to be renamed Race, Ethnicity, and Migrations). I’m working on a book project that focuses on several black women writers who were active in Paris between the wars~ Suzanne Césaire, Jessie Fauset, Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds, the Nardal sisters, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Roberte Horth, Suzanne Lacascade, and Gwendolyn Bennett.

I teach courses on black writers in Paris, the New Negro and Négritude movements, the Harlem Renaissance and New Woman eras, gender and modernism, as well as American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I will be at the 7th Annual Summer School on Black Europe in Amsterdam (as a student!), the Black British Women Writer’s Conference in Brighton, and at the Institut de Touraine for three weeks this summer in my constant effort to improve my French, closing the gaps between my reading, speaking, and writing abilities.

What are YOU working on, my 151 colleagues?

Claire

[Nelly Noury]

Dear Claire,

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer to my post.

I will be happy to introduce myself.  I am a novice in the academic world. I recently defended my Ph.D. dissertation in Francophone studies: ”La traversee des frontieres: Chaibia Tallal, Maissa Bey et Chaibia Tallal.” I have several articles under review and I will be editing a special issue for the review CELAAN (Center for the studies of literatures and arts in North Africa)on Assia Djebar in June 2015. I will be teaching French language and culture at the University of Houston.

While I was conducting my research for my dissertation, I came across the works of Arab-American scholars and artists and I was just blown away. I was introduced to new theoretical frameworks dealing with the issue of the representation of the ”Arab” woman which is at the core of my research.

I hope that the members of this forum will also introduce themselves so that we can start to have an interdisciplinary dialogue, so that people like me who are just starting their academic journey can have intellectual guidance from eminent professors and scholars.

Merci!

Nelly

[Nelly Noury]

I just realized that one major writer in the title of my dissertation is missing! I meant : ”L’esthetique de la traverse: Chaibia Tallal, Maissa Bey and Assia Djebar.”

[Nelly Noury]

Dear Claire,

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer to my post.

I will be happy to introduce myself.  I am a novice in the academic world. I recently defended my Ph.D. dissertation in Francophone studies: ”La traversee des frontieres: Chaibia Tallal, Maissa Bey et Assia Djebar.” I have several articles under review and I will be editing a special issue for the review CELAAN (Center for the studies of literatures and arts in North Africa)on Assia Djebar in June 2015. I will be teaching French language and culture at the University of Houston.

While I was conducting my research for my dissertation, I came across the works of Arab-American scholars and artists and I was just blown away. I was introduced to new theoretical frameworks dealing with the issue of the representation of the ”Arab” woman which is at the core of my research.

I hope that the members of this forum will also introduce themselves so that we can start to have an interdisciplinary dialogue, so that people like me who are just starting their academic journey can have intellectual guidance from eminent professors and scholars.

Merci!

Nelly

[Nicky Agate]

It has been a year since Claire Oberon García asked members of this forum to introduce themselves, a year in which the forum’s membership has doubled. I would like to invite you all once again to introduce yourselves to the group, and to use this forum to share calls for papers, works in progress or completed papers (see the articles on Aimé Césaire shared by Alex Gil in the “deposits” section), syllabi and pedagogical questions, and so on.

As managing editor of the Commons, I would happy to help you with any of the above, and if there were interest amongst the membership, to set you up with a Web site or blog that could serve as a platform to raise public awareness of the work that this forum does, or to connect that work with a broader community. Just let me know!

[Patti Marxsen]

By way of introducing myself… I am an independent writer/scholar whose work relates to the Francophone world. I live in German-speaking Switzerland but use French quite a lot and read French all the time. (Am a former French teacher, among other things.) Just finished Kamel Daoud’s spectacular “Meursault, contre-enquete”… working on an article on Yanick Lahens post-earthquake writing (have been engaged with Haitian studies for years)… just published the first EN translation of Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz’s “Chant de notre Rhone” (as “Riversong of the Rhone”) and will be speaking about this in September in Morges, Switzerland, at the increasingly popular bookfair, “Le Livre sur les quais.” All that said, my major project of the past 4 years has been the first biography in English of the wife of Albert Schweitzer: “Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own” (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2015). More about me at http://www.pattimarxsen.net.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Patti Marxsen.

[Kristin E. Pitt]

Hi, everyone,

I’m an associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and my research focuses primarily on discourses of the body in the contemporary literature of the Americas. I publish more on Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Anglophone authors in the Americas, but I do incorporate some Francophone American authors (generally more Caribbean than Canadian) in my teaching and research as well. I also work on Haitian-American authors like Edwidge Danticat who now write in English.

[Corbin Treacy]

Greetings!

I’m an assistant professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. My research focuses on contemporary Maghrebi literature and film, with a particular interest in Algerian cultural production. I’m currently working on a book project, Aesthetics and Aftermath in Algeria, which analyzes the interplay of literary aesthetics, politics, and the (ongoing) aftermaths of the War for Independence and the “black decade” of the 1990s.

[Jennifer Cazenave]

Hello, everyone,

I am a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the French and Francophone Studies Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. My research focuses on French and Francophone cinema (with a particular focus on film and genocide). Currently, I am working on representations of the Khmer Rouge regime in film and art.

[Philip Kaisary]

Dear All,

I’m a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt and an Assistant Professor in Law and Caribbean Studies at Warwick University in the UK. My first book was a comparative study titled “The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints” (UVA Press, 2014) and I’m currently working on two new projects: one on Haiti’s early constitutions and another on the representation of slavery in film – from the earliest adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin through to Steve McQueen’s adaptation of “12 Years a Slave.”

[Corine Tachtiris]

Hello, all,

I’m joining the virtual party late, but I wanted to add my introduction. I’m currently Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Earlham College where I’ll be teaching language as well as a course on French Caribbean cinema. In French studies, I’m primarily a Haitianist but also work on the rest of the Francophone Caribbean as well as other Francophone cultures. I also translate contemporary Haitian women writers. My larger interests are the circulation and translation of world literature.

Very nice to “meet” you all. Perhaps we can add to the conversation by sharing CFPs we’ve come across recently that might be of interest to other members of the group? I just saw a different thread with what looks to be a very good conference on Haiti, deadline in two days.

All best,

Corine

[Patti Marxsen]

Bonjour Corinne et al.

As a former board member of the Haitian Studies Association (based at UMASS Boston) I can highly recommend the upcoming conference in Montreal. Too late to submit a paper, but surely not too late to register. Sorry not to make it this year myself as I have to be at another conference where I’ll be promoting my new book, first biography in English of “Mrs. Albert Schweitzer”… my first connection with Haiti began about 20 years when I served as a Communications Consultant at Hopital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti.

Kenbe, Patti Marxsen

https://www.umb.edu/haitianstudies/conference

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